


Eclectic Enlightenment

by kheradihr



Category: Cowboy Bebop
Genre: F/M, Gen, Post-Series, life after death, slice of life snippets, spoilers for the entire series
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-07-22
Updated: 2016-04-08
Packaged: 2017-11-10 12:25:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/466239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kheradihr/pseuds/kheradihr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post Cowboy Bebop, Spike wakes up and has to deal with reality in the form of Claire Myles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Reality

He was dreaming. It was all a dream. The arc of Julia’s body as the bullet passed through her chest. The tears in Faye’s eyes as she looked, truly looked into his own during that sole moment of brutal honesty. He still didn’t know the actual reason he told her. Jet watching him go, wondering if he’d ever see the other man again. Vicious’ grim smile before he came at him with his sword drawn. The shocked looks of the Red Dragons as he came down the destroyed escalator, as he put up his finger and—

“Bang.”

The dreams changed.

He floated in the darkness, voices murmuring around him. Some of the voices he recognized, others were strange. He could catch snippets of conversation but he couldn’t grasp the meanings of the words. Soon even that ended.

He awoke to see a long-haired angel standing over him, hair shining like a solar flare. He smiled. It was all a dream after all. A hand he recognized as his own reached out to try to touch her cheek.

“Julia.”

The angel jerked backed as if slapped. With the overhead light illuminating her face, the illusion shattered. Strawberry blonde replaced spun gold and while the woman’s eyes were green, they were a lighter shade, like a cat’s. Faint lines ringed her eyes and mouth that was set in a disapproving frown as she straightened and stepped out of his field of vision. He heard her open a door and a voice asking questions. Faye.

“How is he? Claire?”

“He’s fine,” the other woman snapped. It sounded like she was gathering something outside of his vision. “A perfect picture of the walking dead. First thing out of his mouth was _her_ name. Now that he’s not dead, I’ll assign one of my residents to him. I’ll let myself out.”

Footsteps faded as both women left the room.

“Jet’s making dinner. Can’t you wait?” Faye asked. Whatever the response was went unheard as the two women went downstairs.

Not long after their conversation faded from earshot, a door slammed and Jet’s voice rumbled out from somewhere downstairs, most likely the kitchen. Faye called back a reply as she came upstairs. This time she came close enough for him to see her. Her clothes were different – denim shorts and a yellow tank top – but beyond that she hadn’t changed. There were even tears in her eyes as she sat down on the edge of the bed. She punched him in the shoulder. It hurt, but it was familiar unlike everything else around him.

“Spike, you stupid lunkhead.”

It was two weeks for him to finally be able to get out of bed and another three to be able to walk without assistance. Bryce, Dr. Myles’ – he finally learned the woman’s name – assistant came by every three days to flirt with Faye and check on his progress. He couldn’t get anything out of Jet or Faye about what had happened to him after he collapsed. They both said almost the same thing, that it didn’t matter because he was alive thanks to Dr. Myles. They didn’t want to be reminded of the time he spent in a coma. It was Bryce who told Spike what had happened.

“It was bad,” Bryce explained as he examined Spike’s back one day. “Doc got the call in the middle of clinic. She left so fast we didn’t know what was happening. We still were clueless when she came back in with her travel cases and announced that clinic was closed until further notice. Only after she had dragged us onto a shuttle and were halfway to Mars with only our clothes on our backs did she brief us. The first time we had you in surgery it took a solid eighteen hours. You were so messed up it’s still a miracle you’re alive.”

“That bad?” Spike tried to joke since the man was going grey as he spoke.

“I went to school to be a general practice doctor, not a fucking trauma surgeon. I still have nightmares about it. Seven gunshot wounds, half in major organs. Five stab wounds, one of them barely missed your heart and completely collapsed your lung. Broken arm, wrist, shoulder blade and femur. The only organs not perforated were your heart and intestines, miraculously. You lost so much blood, by the time we finished surgery we used all of your blood type in the hospital. We had to give our own blood to replenish the supply.”

Spike swallowed. He had known he was pretty bad off after fighting Vicious, but hearing it all catalogued made it a part of reality. “You said ‘the first time’.”

“Well, the first time was to make sure you wouldn’t die. The second had us putting your bones together and the third to finish everything up. No prosthetics. Just Claire patching you together piece by ragged piece as we took shifts assisting. Even Trish, who’s a fucking pediatrician and probably hasn’t seen full sized organs since physio one. Afterwards, she and Jet called in favors with the I.S.S.P. to have your charges dropped and you’ve been in a medically induced coma for the past couple of months.”

Spike continued to listen as each day during physical therapy Bryce described in visceral detail the surgeries, the bedside vigils, the tears and begging for him not to die, for her to save his life. For once, he was sobered by the fact that despite _them_ being dead, there were still people who still cared whether he lived or died. He owed Jet and Faye. Once his body was back together, he’d try to settle his debt.

“Dude, you there? Hey! Can you hear me?” A hand attached to a voice landed on his shoulder. Spike looked up.

“What were you saying?”

“I said,” said Bryce sounding exasperated, “that you’re good. All you need to do is have Dr. Myles give you the all clear. I’ll tell her to make an appointment for you.”

He packed his supplies and with a jaunty wave left, calling out for Faye, his mission to woo her still not accomplished.

~~*~~

The appointment was scheduled for a week from Spike’s last check-up with Bryce at four in the afternoon, right before her clinic closed. The plan was if Dr. Myles gave Spike the go-ahead, they’d leave Ganymede the next day. Jet felt that they had imposed on Claire’s hospitality long enough – they had been staying at her family’s home while her parents were on vacation – and bounties were running thin planetside.

On the day of the appointment Jet handed Spike a slip of paper and asked, “You sure you can find it? I don’t need you missing your appointment because you got lost. Claire’s already done a lot for us and I don’t need you to screw things up with her. You got that?”

“Yeah, I got it. Maybe I’ll even get there early.”

Of course, when he said that he didn’t expect the wind to pluck the directions out of his hand and blow them out to sea. Luckily for him he was just crossing into the right neighborhood and it only took asking around for directions a few times to get himself completely and hopelessly lost. Spike looked towards the horizon where the first stars were winking to life in the sunset sky.

Jet was going to kill him.

Out of habit, his hand went to his breast pocket for a cigarette to find nothing. Then he remembered that Faye had confiscated his smokes after catching him light up right after he had recovered. She very sweetly told him that until Claire cleared him he wasn’t allowed to start killing himself just yet and if she caught him doing anything against doctor’s orders, she’d lock him in a padded room. The last bit she snarled out before going downstairs in a fury. Jet wouldn’t even let her approach him for a while afterwards worried that she would undo months of medical treatment in a few minutes.

No smokes. No directions. And he was at least an hour late already.

Yep. Jet was going to kill him. Dead. Whatever medical magic Dr. Myles used on him wouldn’t save him this time. Hell, she’d probably use it to hurt him, he realized bemusedly.

Children laughing broke Spike out of his fatalistic reverie. They were kicking a ball between each other as they ran down the street, behavior typical of nicer urban neighborhoods. A misplaced kick sent the ball flying his direction. He caught it before it hit him and held onto it. When the kids realized he wasn’t going to throw it back, they approached him en masse.

“Oi mister, you lost?” the leader, a boy no more than Ed’s age – and more sanity than the girl ever had – asked.

“Yup. D’you kids know where Dr. Myles’ office is? I have an appointment.”

The group of over ten strong eyed him with distrust while kids on the outer edges kept an eye out for other adults. Odd. It seemed that as nice as the neighborhood was, the kids still didn’t feel comfortable around strangers. As an act of faith, he tossed the ball back. It seemed to have worked. With a jerk of his head, the leader turned the entire group and they began trotting down the street. Spike followed.

A right, left, and two blocks later Spike read, ‘Dr. Claire Myles, M.D. Walk-ins welcome’ painted on a door with a sign hanging in the window declaring the clinic was closed. The lights in the apartment above were out too. Spike turned to the kids.

“Do you guys know where Dr. Myles would be this time of night?

“Why?”

“Because I really need to see her. I can’t leave the planet until she says so.”

One of the kids whispered into the leader’s ear. His jaw dropped as the looked at Spike.

“Are you the lunkhead?”

“Lunkhead? That Faye—”

The kids erupted into laughter and squeals of, “Lunkhead, lunkhead!” that could rival Ed in her most manic states. God, that brat was annoying, he thought as he remembered the child genius. He refused to admit even to himself that he missed her and the yapping mutt. The house he was staying in was too quiet.

“Shut it!” the leader barked. The kids quieted, though he could still hear whispers and giggles from the group. “You the lunkhead that made big sis Faye cry?”

There was no point in lying so he shrugged. “Probably.”

The boy glared at him, an attempt to be intimidating. It would have been more effective if he were taller. “You gonna make her cry again?”

 “I’ll try not to.”

It seemed to be enough for him. “She always gets a drink at the Lion. Skinny here’ll show you where it is.”

He gestured to a girl so thin he didn’t doubt her name. She looked at him as if he wasn’t worth her time before jerking her head and trotting down the street. Wondering if most kids on Ganymede half spoke in head jerks, Spike followed the girl. Eventually she dashed into a door with no sign on it. He stepped inside.

And found a smoky bar, lights low except for the ones pointing to the stage. Most of the patrons’ eyes were on the stage where a soulful saxophone sang. The kid – he couldn’t be more than fifteen, sixteen at most – reminded him of Gren, all dreamy eyes and secret smile under his messy fringe of dishwater blonde hair. He wondered if the kid was like Gren, a dreamer until the end. A small hand tugged his, pulling him out of the music and memories. Skinny looked at him with oddly luminous grey eyes full of understanding a kid her age shouldn’t have before pulling him to the bar. She clambered onto a stool and the bartender turned to her.

“Done playing with your friends, Skylar?”

“Yeah,” she replied, fluffing out her hair from her braid. The change was drastic; in a few more years she’d be breaking the hearts of the same boys she beat up now. “Give me my usual. And where’s Dad? He doesn’t leave you alone on the bar.”

“He’s fixing a glitch in the sound system. The kid’s playing unhooked right now. One orange juice on the rocks.” He slid the drink in front of the girl before turning to Spike. “What can I get you sir?”

“Whisky on the rocks. Is Dr. Myles here?”

Suddenly every patron within earshot’s eyes were on him. Each held suspicion in their eyes. Looking at the men and women staring at him, things made sense. The neighborhood hadn’t been a safe place for very long, definitely not long enough that the kids hadn’t forgotten. Blatantly ignoring the tension between Spike and the other patrons, the bartender asked mildly, “What is your business with Miss Claire?”

Spike smiled ruefully. “I’m her four o’clock.”

The bartender chuckled as if he finally got the punch line of a joke and pointed into the darkness. “Miss Claire is in her usual seat over there.”

He waved a thanks as he made his way over to her table. Her eyes were on the stage and didn’t shift as he approached. He waited but when she didn’t acknowledge him, he sat down next to her.

“Sorry I’m late, I got—”

A hand rose to his face, interrupting whatever excuse he was still coming up with. It pointed to the stage.

“Shut up and listen.”

Instead of ignoring the blatant order, Spike stayed quiet and listened to the boy play. The whisky was good, all the way to how perfect the ice was. It seemed so surreal, sitting in a bar having a drink and listening to slow jazz. He couldn’t remember the last time he did this. He and Jet were usually too poor to use a bar as recreation; bars were for casing bounty heads and the drinks cheap since food and smokes were more important than liquor. At the end of the performance, he even found himself applauding with the rest of the patrons instead of scanning the crowd to make sure his mark hadn’t slipped out. The kid wove through the crowd accepting complements from the audience and joined them just as Spike tried to talk to her again. She waved him off and told the kid to sit. He cradled his sax against his chest as if it would protect him from her.

“You’re good, kid. Got a name?”

“Jayse, ma’am.”

She nodded as if she expected his answer. “You got a girl? In any business?”

The kid shook his head. “Don’t have anything but what I’ve got on me.”

“I’ll give you the job. You work six a week, six each night. There’s a flat above the bar that you’ll live in and you eat free here. You’ll get an advance for you to buy some clean clothes; anything you need for the flat you can put it on the shopping list for the bar. If you get yourself into any sort of shit, just leave the flat keys on the bar and vanish. You got me?”

The kid looked like he was about to burst from happiness. “Thank you so much ma’am. I won’t disappoint you.”

“Uh-huh. Go to Neil, he’ll set you up.”

She waited until he left before reaching for her drink and taking a few healthy swallows. Spike recognized what was drifting across her eyes: memories one would rather forget existed. When she put a cigarette to her lips, he offered her lighter to her. It startled her and he realized she had forgotten that he was there. She let him light her cigarette for her before eyeing him.

“What do you want?”

“I have an appointment.”

“Three hours ago. You don’t expect me to give you an exam now. I’m off the clock.”

“I thought doctors swear some oath or something.”

“I swore to ‘do no harm’. Pushing your exam back doesn’t harm you.”

“It may if Jet doesn’t get off this planet.”

“Not my problem. Yours, actually.”

“Please?” Spike asked, offering his best smile. She just snorted smoke at him. He really wanted a cigarette right now.

“That won’t work on me.”

“Why not?”

“Because I grew up with a guy that could get an angel to fall from Heaven with his smile. You have nothing on him.”

The description reminded him of something Faye had said once. “Was he a dreamy sax player whose blue eyes were often mistaken for Heaven?”

Her choking on her cigarette answered his question well enough. When she caught her breath, she stood. “I changed my mind. I’ll give you your exam if it will get you out off my planet.”

They left the bar and headed towards her clinic, her pace just fast enough for them to ensure some distance between them. Only the wisp of smoke trailing behind her connected them. Jet would have said it was a sign or a symbol of something meaningful. All Spike knew was that it was cold with the sea wind blowing. Instead of stopping at the clinic’s door she led him around the building, up a set of wrought iron stairs to a different door. She unlocked the door and let them in. When she flipped on the lights Spike found himself in a tastefully decorated loft. Photographs filled most the largest wall.

“This doesn’t look like much of a clinic.”

“Can the snark, cowboy. I can’t use the clinic without the entire neighborhood descending on me. Amuse yourself while I set up my table."

Taking that as tacit permission to snoop, Spike went over to look at the pictures on the wall. The first one he saw was a small child being held by a man and woman. The hair was chopped boyishly short and childishly uneven. She had a miniature shoulder holster on. He didn’t even know that they made them that small. He continued to look through the pictures. Most of them were of landmarks throughout the solar system while others seemed random. A few involved the man or woman holding the child. Then one caught his eye.

“You knew the Terpsichores?”

“Shit! Zeros, come and eat!” she called as she headed for the kitchen. “Mom and Dad worked with them on and off. You’ve met Vi?”

Spike stared at the large grey cat as it padded out of her bed and down the stairs. He meowed a lazy greeting before trotting into the kitchen. “Yeah. Wait, your parents worked with them?”

“They were bounty hunters like Vi and Ural. On big jobs they always teamed up.” She came out of the kitchen hair tied back and gestured to the cleared table in her dining room. “Clothes off and get on the table.”

When he was seated on the table in nothing but his boxers and socks she shined a light in his eyes. “Keep ‘em open.”

“How’d a bounty hunter’s kid end up as a doctor?”

“I patched them or their bounty heads up when needed. It just made sense to get into it. Open your mouth, stick out your tongue."

He complied. When she was checking his lymph nodes he asked, “How long have you been here?”

“I bought out the doctor here right after I returned from the Titan War.”

“You knew Gren?”

“He was one of the street kids who lived in this neighborhood. He first worked as a busboy at the Lion before he got into music. Whenever Mom and Dad were planetside they hung out there. I stitched him up after some toughs beat him up. He deserved it, flirting with one of their girls.”

“And Jet?”

“I interned at his precinct as a M. E.’s assistant and we became friends. Don’t you have something better to do?”

Spike off-handedly noted that she was cute when annoyed. “Better than you being all over me?”

She rolled her eyes and grabbed a handful of pictures off the wall without looking. She thrust them at him. “How about you look at these and if you have questions you can ask them _after_ I’m done?”

He didn’t talk to her for the rest of the examination except for the occasional “Ow!” “The hell’s your problem?” that she got for testing nerve and muscle reaction. When she finally told him that she was done he handed her the stack of pictures. His eyes were surprisingly serious.

“I think you need to tell me about all of these.”

Taking the pictures, she flipped through them. “Ah. Well. I’m going to need a drink and a smoke if I’m to do this. Join me on the front step?”

“Only if I can get my own.”

~~*~~

“I volunteered for the Titan War when it broke out. It seemed easier to handle than all the pandering that was going on working in the hospitals. If I survived, I’d be a full doctor. If I didn’t, at least I did something worthwhile,” she explained looking at the picture of her, Gren and Vicious. They were dirty and passing a cigarette around, laughing about something. “I didn’t know that Gren had enlisted until a few months in when my unit got wiped out and I was reassigned. He was already head over heels hero-worshipping Vicious.”

“What was he like?” Spike asked casually, half hoping she would misunderstand his question.

“He looked like a man slowly dying. It’s probably why Gren and I were so drawn to him.” She chuckled grimly. “The others in our unit called us Death’s Fireflies.”

“Why did he join?” For all the years he knew Vicious, he couldn’t understand why he would join in the bloodiest war in history. His former best friend was too cold, too calculating for the sheer bedlam that war was.

Claire’s face twisted as if she had a bad taste in her mouth. “Julia. First Vicious with his damnable music box and then Gren. It always came back to her. You know, I had convinced him to come home and let me help him get better before she showed up in his bar? Years of friendship, blood, of _everything_ thrown away because one woman was bitter that she couldn’t get a fast ticket out of the slums. Fucking bitch.”

He had never liked hearing Jet speak about Julia and to hear the hatred and bitterness in Claire’s voice pissed him off. “Where do you get off—”

“I’ve seen three good men die for one woman’s pettiness,” she snarled back. They stared at each other for a few moments before Claire turned away with a curse. She knocked back half of her drink and lit another cigarette but didn’t smoke it. In the time she stared at the smoke wafting to the sky her voice softened. “He told me about it. Him and Julia.”

That surprised him. “He what?”

She nodded absently. “Mind you, he was convinced that he was going to die from an infected wound he got from shrapnel because he was covering me as I was saving a kid’s life. I was probably the closest thing to a confessional he had.”

The look in her eyes told him she heard more than her fair shares of confessions and this one had stuck with her the longest.

“The deal that went south and you got hurt? Right after that, Vicious had told Julia that he couldn’t take her from Mars. He had no idea you were still alive, all he knew was that he needed to stay with the Red Dragons so there weren’t any more needless deaths like you. After he told her, she became distant but he didn’t care because you suddenly weren’t dead and for those few months his world was right. He only found out about you and Julia when she cried out your name instead of his. Then you were planning to leave. The betrayals ate at him, poisoning the man you called brother. He thought he could die on Titan, even asked me to light a candle for him if I was ever near a church.”

“And Gren? Where did he fit into all this?”

“Vicious framed him for something; I never got all the details. When he broke out of jail, I found him and convinced him to let go of his attachment to Vicious – which pretty much drove him insane in prison – and come home. Then _she_ showed up.”

He knew this part, just not how deeply Julia was involved. She virtually orchestrated every encounter between him and Vicious after he left the Red Dragons. He should have known when Faye gave him the message but his thoughts were so filled with _her_ to think clearly. “She convinced him to have revenge against Vicious.”

By this point Claire was drinking straight from the bottle and refusing to look at him, staring straight ahead into the alley. He wondered if she resented him still being alive when both Gren and Vicious were dead.

“You really hate her, huh.”

“She destroyed two men and maybe a third just because she couldn’t act on her own beyond revenge.” Claire barked a laugh. “She’s a disgrace to all women, and I don’t even believe in that shit.”

“She’s dead now, maybe you should move on.”

She turned to him and blew smoke in his face.

“I’ll move on when you do.”

Absurdly enough, that matter-of-fact retort made him laugh.

“Sure.”

They sat together for a few more hours, neither talking, simply staring into the night sky and sharing smokes and the bottle. Eventually, Spike checked the time. Realizing how late it was and considering how early of a start Jet wanted he stood and began heading down the stairs.

“Jet wants to leave early, so I should get going.”

Claire nodded again, wry smile on her face. “Don’t get yourself killed out there, Spike. There’s only so many times I can patch you up.”

She was right. He was alive without ghosts of his past chasing him. His life was his own now, wholly and completely. He wondered what he’d do with it. Armed with this realization, he stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked back at Claire as she still stared off into the distance, forgotten cigarette halfway to her lips. She wasn’t Julia. She sure wasn’t Faye. And he still hadn’t figured out if that was a good or bad thing.

He did take a few steps up to come even with her and plucked the cigarette from her hands. For the first time that night, she looked into his eyes without the cool detachedness of a professional. Her eyes were really like a cat’s; it was uncanny. Unable to keep his lips from twitching up into a smile, he pressed them against hers and pulled away just as unexpectedly.

“See you around, Doc.”

~~*~~

The next morning, Jet found him awake and going through his martial art forms. It was obvious he was rusty. He offered him a cup of coffee as they watched the sun rise.

“You good?”

“Doc gave me a clean bill of health and advice to not get killed.”

Jet chuckled. “Sounds like Claire, all right. Get dressed, we already have a job.”

When they made it to the Bebop a familiar face was waiting for them. Claire greeted Faye with a hug and Jet with a slap on the back. Then she offered Jet Zeros. The cat meowed a greeting.

“I got the call last night. Vi decided to cut her vacation short and since you are heading for Venus, you can drop him off at her port. Payment has already been wired. Think about it, meat!”

Jet took the cat and scratched him under the chin as Spike spluttered, “You can’t be serious Jet! It’ll shed everywhere and scratch up everything!”

Both Claire and Zeros looked offended by the accusation while Faye began to laugh at his expense. “Welcome back to the business, Spike,” she gasped out between laughs.

The cat squirmed out of Jet’s arms and jumped to Spike’s head, purring the moment it nestled in his hair. Everyone began laughing harder.

“Shit.”


	2. Morning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mornings are the same on the Bebop. Spike considers them now he's not dead.

Morning dawned on the Bebop as every morning did. Spike rose first when not brutally wounded, scratched, and while still scratching, padded to an open space to practice Jeet Kun Do. Sauntering through the living room he skirted around a pair of stiletto heels expertly thrown to simultaneously be as far from the owner as possible but close enough together that the owner could pick them up on the way to the shower. The owner of said heels was curled up on the sofa, skirt hiked up and shirt loose and open to show her bra and at least two still-filled knife sheaths underneath her shirt. Hair draped over her face and Spike was too lazy to bend down to lift it and see what her face was like when sleeping. Most likely it was some looser version of her usual expression, constantly on the verge of anger with the only barrier being something that amused her.

Finding Claire sleeping somewhere other than her room was becoming a part of his morning ritual, Spike realized as he settled into a stance in the open space behind the couch. Her sleeping on the couch was not unusual compared to times he found her sleeping on the stairs like Ed, floating in the grav wheel, tucked between a wall and Jet’s bonsai shelves, curled like a child in between Red Tail’s guns. He simply noted the location frequency in the growing catalogue of places he found her sleeping after working a late night. As a licensed doctor, her presence was demanded in every port they stopped at. It was a hassle and a blessing all at once. True, they couldn’t pull out the moment they learned a bounty was already nabbed or had skipped orbit just as they came out of the gates but there was always work. Usually it was escorting Claire to wherever she was providing her services. No matter how much a client sputtered and swore and even threatened, Claire charged them triple, sometimes quadruple her rate under the understanding that if she had to bring in her own muscle, they had to be paid somehow too. It always did crack him up when they eyed Faye and her as if either of the women couldn’t punch their way out of a wet paper bag let alone armed enforcers. When negotiations went south he and Jet would usually find both women smiling viciously as they had Wulongs deposited onto their cards and Claire reminding hired muscle that knowing how to heal also meant knowing how to hurt.

That always had Jet laughing, deep belly laughs as he squatted down to eye level with the injured and patched up men. “What the hell were you thinking, Claire Myles isn’t some quack you can bully around. Unless you’re into that kind of thing,” he would add, gesturing at their faces if they didn’t understand.

Their jaws would have dropped if they weren’t gauzed shut from having them dislocated or broken. It was what Claire called “The Myles Special” and it always ended up with even more money in their pockets.

“I was taught to return everything to rights when I was done playing. Charging for all services rendered is what makes me an excellent businesswoman,” Claire explained once over passing around a bottle decent whiskey, her sling back heels dangling from her free hand. Walking back to the spaceport late at night had its pleasures. For Claire, wearing heels when not working was not one of them. For Spike and the others, being able to walk home with money in their pockets, food in their stomachs, and booze on their lips was.

“It’s things like that that ruin your image and get out kicked out of good hospitals.” Jet groused before slinging the bottle back.

“Are you going to tell her she’s never going to marry too?” Faye laughed. “You’re such an old man, Jet.”

“Someone has to tell Claire those things. I don’t think her parents are doing their job in harassing her.” Spike added just to add to the pile on Jet. It got both Jet and Claire laughing for different reasons.

Dawn was coming over the horizon and as Jet and Faye headed into the Bebop Spike looked back to find Claire sitting on the nose of the Bebop. Her heels lay behind her as she watched the sun come up.

“Spike?”

“I’ll head in in a bit,” he called. Jet muttered something before the hatch shuddered closed.

“I’m not sharing,” Claire said as Spike stepped to the edge. “The rest is mine since I had to do surgery.”

“Fine. Then I won’t share my cigs with you.” Claire grimaced into her bottle and then shrugged like didn’t want one. Spike knew her well enough; smoking was for when the sun went down. She preferred a strong drink in the morning, whether it was coffee, tea, or liquor. Claire was not a morning person, whether it was always that way or if her time in the military changed her preference, no one knew except her. Everyone who had known was dead. The sun rose and with it Claire’s eyes grew longer with time passing. She was somewhere else where memory was more real than her reality.

“Where are you right now?” he asked quietly, inhaling his third cig since he sat down. The bottle was almost gone and he could now see faint lines around her eyes, aging her older than her years.

“Titan. Ganymede. Mars. Earth. The sun rising always makes me tick off who’s alive and who isn’t. When it comes down to it, each life I do save never feels like enough when I remember who’s gone.”

“Like Gren.”

She nodded and lifted the bottle. It tipped and poured out into the water below. “Gren. Vicious. Karina. Ural. Miki. The list goes on and on, like planets in ever expanding orbits, a new name the longer I’ve been alive.”

Bottle empty, she rose and left him on the deck.

It was things like that that Spike remembered as he held a kick. It wasn’t just things about Claire but about Faye and Jet too. Since he woke he caught himself sitting nearby watching Jet trim his bonsai, or Faye paint her toenails. Without Ed and Ein around for Faye to paint, she turned on Claire, Jet, and even Spike. He drew the line on fingernails so unlike Jet, his toes were a nauseous chartreuse while his fingers were bare except for whatever dirt gathered underneath them in his day. He knew how to properly water Jet’s bonsai since Faye refused to care for something living and Claire didn’t know what the bonsai looked like without sleep-gummed eyes. Mornings were more than time to exercise, to keep his body as well tuned as his gun. Tuning the Swordfish was an exercise in futility and he learned long ago to pick his battles when it came to his ship.

Now, after being given reality, mornings were for remembering, meditating, and if one was remotely religious, they might even say Spike’s mornings were for prayer.

Of course, he was Spike Spiegel. He never did anything in any way that looked like the tradition definition of those things. His punches were Faye swindling a swindler by pulling a brand new hand – a winning hand of cards that were never in the man’s deck – out of her cleavage. Chop kicks were Jet choking out their bounty so Claire could sew him back together enough for them to not lose any of the reward for damages. Feints were Ed and Ein’s laughter as they figured out a new game or hacked someone, it didn’t matter what the laughter was for since the maniacal cackling and howling meant only one thing: they won. Blocks were Claire rolling up her sleeves to show mirrored Special Forces Titan War tattoos just underneath the inside of her elbows – declaring she was a medic of two different units – before she slugged it out with whoever was burly enough to still stand after she emptied all her throwing knife sheaths into them.

Spike still dreamed about Vicious and Julia, Gren and Faye’s tear-filled eyes, Jet and bloody two-headed crimson dragons consuming each other in a mobius strip of ouroboros. Sometimes they had him waking so violently he could only exorcise them through holding positions until his muscles screamed for surrender but he only gave them what they wanted because someone put a fresh pack of cigs and liquor-dosed coffee just out of reach. Other mornings he would wake and think he was still dreaming but a different one, where he had a life beyond trying to sever himself from the cord of fate that strangled him most of his life away from Vicious and Julia.

It was one of those mornings when he first found Claire on the Bebop’s couch in nothing but her underwear, scraps of wet clothes hanging from the line on one side of the living room. The blanket that should have covered her lay half-flung over the coffee table and whatever had been dropped on the table leaving indecipherable lumps underneath. Jet was up as well, blearily making coffee with actual coffee beans rather than the powdered shit they bought to be cheap. The racket the hand-cranked coffee grinder made didn’t faze the sleeping woman meters away but Spike still shut the kitchen door behind him.

“She missed the last flight back to Ganymede,” Jet answered the question on Spike’s face. “Letting her stay the night wasn’t a problem.”

“You know she’s only wearing her underwear.”

Jet simply pulled down a bottle of bourbon from the cabinet and set it next to the ancient percolator that hissed angrily at being manhandled. “That’s Faye’s actually. Claire’s were so gross she burned them.”

“What was she doing?”

“Getting caught in a drive-by at the opening of one of her student’s new practices.” Jet swore heartily as he watched the coffee drip. “She didn’t even know she called me. Faye picked her up after the dog races and now the Red Tail is more aptly named.”

Spike took the tantrum that was building up inside him to the flight deck and went through his katas amidst the fighters that he knew as well as his own body. Hammerhead sat quietly like a sleeping tiger, large and indolent. Red Tail gleamed in the dim light, still draining pink water from the hasty hosing Faye subjected it to less than a few hours ago. His own fighter, Swordfish, sprawled out arrogant and ostentatious like a lion on a safari truck’s hood. By the time he worked out the feelings he refused to name the fighters were too familiar and Claire was awake and dressed, drinking coffee out of one of Jet’s chipped mugs, leaving the intact ones for others. With that she began to show up more and more often until she, like the other women before her, became a full time member of the Bebop’s crew.

That was why Spike reheated and poured yesterday’s coffee into a chipped mug after his morning workout and leaned over Claire’s sleeping form. She always stirred slowly but Spike had time to wait on her. When she opened her cat grass-green eyes she smiled sleepily and reached for the coffee he easily turned over. Once he attempted to play keep away with her coffee and it got him a near appendectomy.

“Is it morning already?” She always sounded so disbelieving when he woke her from her sleeping spot in the Bebop.

He nodded and stepped back to watch her stand, stretch, and swear before sipping the not-rough-enough coffee. She shuffled stiff-legged down the hall to her room. He heard her bounce off the walls at least twice with answering curses before the door shut. So few bounces meant her late night job hadn’t been so bad; once he watched her ooze along the wall like a snail leaving a smear of coffee, blood, and curses against the wall. Jet made him clean it up since it was Spike waking her that resulted in the mess.

Another morning habit completed with no major incident, he went to the bridge to have his morning coffee and smoke.


End file.
